FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Jacques Rivette - Duelle 

Does cinema still seem like a dream? No, it has long since died out. And the attempt to reconstruct the dreamlike usually fails miserably. In the past, people used forms from other narrative forms or completely reinvented them. Nostalgia, memory, legend, dream. This is the universal drive of cinema: To experience a mystery unadulterated. In surrealism, characters often symbolize the desire to impose something like order on the general chaos. A pattern. So there is a kind of other film, an unreal one, that takes place while seeing real ones. We see more than what appears on the screen. This is precisely why many view cinephelie with suspicion, because in this discipline cinema seems like a remnant of times long past, like the last vestige of mysticism. In Jacques Rivette's work, the characters are often in a state of absolute euphoria or mania. They experience the world like prehistoric beings. Every experience is shattered. Duels has no center. There are a variety of recurring themes and life seems like a game. Those who are freaked out enter this round dance. Rivette's game is littered with paradoxes, doublings. Again and again, the game becomes reality. Subliminally. It seems a bit like a continuation of Celine and Julie. Here, too, young and beautiful women meet by chance, take on the role of amateur detectives in a case with a possibly metaphysical dimension. It all begins as a play in a seedy hotel lobby. The second girl shows up and inspires the first girl to do detective work. Only after a while does it dawn on them that this game was serious all along.... At the same time, every shot seems like a dream. Rivette uses codes and everything points back to something bigger. You think Duelle is pointing at the theater curtain to hide it at the same time. Or something like that. In any case, everything in Duelle seems enchanted and at some point you wonder if Paris is the most haunted city.